Catch it is the result of a collaboration between the Institute of Psychology Health of the University of Liverpool and the University of Manchester. The goal is to provide users insight in the how and why of their feelings. The application relies on a number of principles from cognitive behavioural therapy in orde to achieve this goal. The developers furthermore highlight that the app should primarily be considered as a tool to illustrate and demonstrate the key principles, rather than for it to be an alternative for professional care.

– Whenever you wish to record a mood, you can select a number of defaults from a menu or enter a mood yourself. When doing so, you can also rate the intensity and provide your location. Irrespective of the valence of the emotion and the intensity of that emotion, you subsequently run through a process of challenging your cognitions and trying to change them (or their intensity). In the case of the registration of a strong, positive emotion, this seems somewhat inappropriate.
– There is no possibility to receive automatic notifications: you have to take the initiative to commence a registration yourself.

+ The app pays strong attention to data protection: each time you boot the app (and even when you switch between applications), you are required to enter a 4 digit PIN to gain access to the diary. There is also an extensive part of the app that concerns privacy and it also allows you to indicate whether or not you wish to share your data anonymously with the app’s researcher (an option which is inactive by default).
+ The app has a nice design and is intuitive to use.
+ You can easily export diary data as an email attachment in a CSV-format.

“Catch it can be a useful tool to keep track of one or several emotions and if applicable, also to challenge them an subsequently share yhour experience, for example with a mental healthcare professional.”